In 1956, in his Principles of Embryology, Conrad Hal Waddington explained that the word “epigenetics” should be used to translate and update Wilhelm Roux’ German notion of “Entwicklungsmechanik” to qualify the studies focusing on the mechanisms of development. When Waddington mentioned it in 1956, the notion of epigenetics was not yet popular, as it would become from the 1980s. However, Waddington referred first to the notion in the late 1930s. While his late allusion clearly reveals that Waddington readily associated the (...) notion of epigenetics with the developmental process, in the contemporary uses of the notion this developmental connotation seems to have disappeared. The advent and success of molecular biology have probably contributed to focusing biologists’ attention on the “genetic” or the “non-genetic” over the “developmental”. In the present paper, I first examine the links that exist, in Waddington’s work, between the classical notion of epigenesis in embryology and those of epigenetics that Waddington proposed to connect, and even synthesize, data both from embryology and genetics. Second, I show that Waddington’s own view of epigenetics has changed over time and I analyze how these changes appear through his many representations of the relationships between genetic signals and developmental processes. (shrink)

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. In order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or inventiveness to life itself, Malabou has to suppress the unsettled debates within the life sciences. The aporias of evolutionary narrative and causality reveal a necessary differentiality and textuality that belongs neither to life nor science itself, but leaves a (...) haunting remanence within every corpus. New materialism resists this necessity of life-science, which calls for a deconstructive reading. (shrink)